Redding Rancheria Chair Jack Potter Jr., himself part Wintu, called the claim that his tribe would build its casino on the massacre grounds “a slander that will not be easily forgotten.” He told state lawmakers that the real massacre site is miles away. “There are dozens of other places along the I-5 corridor and the Sacramento River.” the blood-soaked dirt of the massacre site,” Gary Rickard, chair of the Wintu Tribe of Northern California, told a state Assembly committee in August. “In my heart, I find it hard to believe that there are Wintu people that are willing to build a casino on. If the higher estimates of the death toll are correct, it would rank as one of the largest single mass killings of Indigenous people in American history. Estimates of the carnage, recorded over the decades from witness accounts and oral tradition, range from 150 to 1,000 men, women and children slaughtered along the banks of the Sacramento River. troops killed as many as 300 Lakota people. The Sacramento River massacre has not received the attention of other atrocities of America’s westward expansion, such as the one in 1890 at Wounded Knee, S.D., where U.S. Cavalry that historians say probably killed hundreds of Native people. And now the BIA’s obscure bureaucrats have been confronted with an explosive new charge from two neighboring tribes: that construction of the casino would desecrate what the tribes say should be hallowed ground - the site of an 1846 rampage by the U.S. Those complaints have helped stall, but not kill, the project, whose fate rests almost solely in the hands of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. The naysayers list a cavalcade of complaints against the new Win-River casino complex, saying it would despoil prime farmland, exacerbate traffic, increase police and fire protection costs and threaten native fish in the Sacramento River. The rancheria - home to descendants from three historic tribes - began planning the development nearly two decades ago, envisioning a regional magnet for tourists and gamblers.īut the proposal has been buffeted by influential opponents, including the city of Redding, neighborhood groups and the billionaire next door - who happens to be the largest private landowner in America.

The casino envisioned by the Redding Rancheria and its 422 members would rise nine stories on 232 acres along Interstate 5.

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